Where to watch Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977)

Trivia & production notes

• George Lucas pitched Star Wars to multiple major studios including Universal Pictures, Paramount Pictures, Walt Disney Productions, and United Artists, all of whom rejected it before Twentieth Century-Fox greenlit the project.
• Alan Ladd Jr. at Twentieth Century-Fox funded Star Wars for $150,000 based on his faith in Lucas's talent rather than his understanding of the project itself, which Ladd later acknowledged he did not fully grasp on a technical level.
• Lucas initially tried to acquire the film rights to Flash Gordon from King Features in 1971 but was unable to because the company was pursuing Federico Fellini to direct it, which prompted him to write an original space opera instead.
• Lucas created Chewbacca's character based on his own Alaskan Malamute dog, Indiana, whom he called his "co-pilot" when she sat in the passenger seat of his car, and the dog's name would later be given to the character Indiana Jones.
• In Lucas's early draft, Han Solo was conceived as a large, green-skinned monster with gills rather than the human smuggler who appears in the final film.
• Luke Skywalker was originally named Luke Starkiller and began as a general character before Lucas changed him into an adolescent farm boy during script development.
• The film's famous opening crawl was originally six paragraphs of four sentences each until filmmaker Brian De Palma criticized it for being too long and incomprehensible after viewing an unfinished cut, leading him and Jay Cocks to edit it down to four sentences.
• Lucas wrote four different complete screenplays for Star Wars between January 1973 and January 1976, continuously revising characters, plot elements, and the overall story structure.
• Fox's initial budget of $5 million for Star Wars was later increased to $8.25 million, and Lucas deliberately conceived the film's "used" look and reduced complex special effects shots because Fox had recently shut down its special effects department.
• Lucas's second draft was over 200 pages long, which prompted him to split the story into multiple films, though this created a problem requiring him to use the ending of Return of the Jedi for the first Star Wars film so that both movies would not have identical Death Star conclusions.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Star Wars (film), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.